A Commentary on the Passing Scene by
Robert Paul Wolff
rwolff@afroam.umass.edu

Coming Soon:

The following books by Robert Paul Wolff are available on Amazon.com as e-books: KANT'S THEORY OF MENTAL ACTIVITY, THE AUTONOMY OF REASON, UNDERSTANDING MARX, UNDERSTANDING RAWLS, THE POVERTY OF LIBERALISM, A LIFE IN THE ACADEMY, MONEYBAGS MUST BE SO LUCKY, AN INTRODUCTION TO THE USE OF FORMAL METHODS IN POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY.Now Available: Volumes I, II, III, and IV of the Collected Published and Unpublished Papers.

NOW AVAILABLE ON YOUTUBE: LECTURES ON KANT'S CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON. To view the lectures, go to YouTube and search for "Robert Paul Wolff Kant." There they will be.

NOW AVAILABLE ON YOUTUBE: LECTURES ON THE THOUGHT OF KARL MARX. To view the lectures, go to YouTube and search for Robert Paul Wolff Marx."

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Archive of Wolff Materials

Wednesday, May 31, 2017

I dislike being lectured, especially by those who do not choose to disclose their identities, so I shall not respond to recent comments. Those who find this unacceptable are free to seek out other blogs, of which there is no scarcity.

Monday, May 29, 2017

Ewan joins the conversation on this blog with a lengthy
response to my post Idle Speculation. He objects to my characterization of Vladimir
Putin’s foreign policy as imperialistic, and after a series of observations
about Putin’s behavior and that of the United States, he remarks “Compared to
the US, Russia is the grown up.”

I shall not dispute Ewan’s factual assertions – as I
remarked at the beginning of the post, I know little or nothing about these
matters and warned readers to take them for what they were worth. But the remark that I quote, I believe,
reveals a way of thinking about international affairs that is fundamentally
wrong, and I shall spend some time explaining why. Now, I have written about this before, and
like many writers, I am in the grips of the bizarre fantasy that someone who
has read anything by me must surely have read everything by me, but, to
paraphrase that great fantasist Ronald Reagan, though I believe in my heart
that this is true, I know in my head that it is not. So here goes.

If, like me, you have spent your entire adult life inveighing
against the self-congratulatory ideological mystifications of America’s
imperial projects, and if it makes you, as it makes me, “faintly nauseous” [to
quote James Comey] each time you hear an American apologist describe this
country as “the good guy” on the international scene, you might be seduced into
a transvaluation of values, leading you to call America the bad guy and America’s
opponent the good guy [or “the grown up.”]
But that would be a mistake.

The world is a complex array of nation-states, some of which
have been imperial powers [Spain, France, Germany, Great Britain, Mongolia,
among others], some of which are currently imperial powers [China, Russia, the
United States], and the rest of which would be imperial powers if they could. There are two models of imperium, or Ideal
Types, as Max Weber would have labeled them.
One model is the ceaseless expansion of the homeland into contiguous
territories – China, Russia, and to some extend Germany exemplify this
model. The other is the projection of
imperial power overseas or to non-contiguous territories – England, Mongolia,
Spain, Portugal, and France come to mind.

The United States has pursued a rather complex mix of these
two styles of imperialism. Very early in
its history, it declared the Western Hemisphere its natural sphere of interest,
projecting military and economic power to a number of places in Central and
South America. At the same time, America’s
principal imperial project for its first hundred years was the forceful incorporation
of all the territory to the west and southwest of the original thirteen states,
ending only when America reached the Pacific Ocean. Once that Manifest Destiny had been
accomplished, America reverted to the alternative model of imperialism,
projecting its power into the Pacific and the Northwest.

The Second World War ended with two great empires bestriding
the world like Colossi: The Soviet Union
and America. The Soviet Union had
successfully expanded both east into Central Asia and west into the Baltic and
Eastern Europe, incorporating a contiguous territory spanning eleven time
zones. America had, in effect, inherited
the imperial purple of Great Britain and France, and now, seventy years later,
has its troops stationed in upwards of one hundred fifty countries. Things did not always go smoothly for the two
hegemons, of course. The Soviet Union’s
Afghanistan adventure ended badly, contributing to its eventual breakup. America ill-considered attempt to assume France’s
role in Southeast Asia was so disastrous that it was forced to reconstitute its
military force to repair the damage.

In all of this, there are no good guys and bad guys, no
grownups and wayward children. There are
just states [not individuals, remember] expanding their imperial reach until
they come up against other states strong enough to oppose them successfully. The underlying purposes of these expansions
vary. America’s motives are transparently
those of international capital. China’s
motives are in part those of state capitalism and in part an effort at internal
consolidation and stabilization [Owen Lattimore’s classic work, The Inner Asian Frontiers of China, is,
as I have observed before on this blog, a useful guide.] Russia’s motives appear to be in part
economic and in part revanchist.

What then is a man or woman of the left to think? If there are no good guys and no bad guys,
where do I hang my hat and my heart? I
can only offer the answer that satisfies me.
Put not your trust in princes, as the Good Book says [Psalm 146, chapter
23, verse 5]. Choose your comrades in
this world, those with whom you make common cause, and then fight alongside
them for what you and they believe to be right and just.

I was searching for an old post in preparation for responding to Ewan's comment on Idle Speculation when I came upon this brief item that I posted a year and a half ago. I liked it so much that I decided to post it again. No one has ever accused me of modesty, false or otherwise. A HARD ACT TO FOLLOWDecember 26th, the day each year that falls between Jesus' birthday and mine."Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce." Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon.

Sunday, May 28, 2017

I have done the Sunday TIMES
crossword puzzle and both the 5 x 5 and 7 x 7 KenKens, so it is time for some idle
speculation. I trust everyone
understands that I have absolutely no first-hand knowledge of any of the subjects I shall be speculating
about. Pay attention at your peril! Here goes.
I write with an air of certainty simply because speculation is no fun if
it is hedged round with caveats.

It is now clear that Jared Kushner really did approach the
Russians with a proposal to use their Embassy equipment to communicate with the
Kremlin. This follows from the fact that
H. R. McMaster and John Flynn have publicly stated that there is nothing
untoward about the action. If this were
a Russian trick, they would be condemning the media for publishing false
stories.

Why did he do this so close to the time when the Trump team
would take over the government anyway?
It is not because he and his colleagues in the Trump White House are
inexperienced or stupid or reckless or impatient. And it certainly is not because he and the
Trump team have any substantive national policies that they wish to
pursue. They don’t.

I think I know the answer.
Here it is [for what it is worth.]
Trump and Kushner are real estate speculators. They are not ideologues, they are not right
wing or left wing or middle of the road, they are real estate speculators. That is who they have been all their lives
and it is all they know or care about, leaving aside sociopathic narcissism and
all that.

After Trump’s serial bankruptcies, he was forced to seek
foreign and dodgy financing for his schemes, because American banks would no longer
lend to him. So he went deeply into debt
with DeutscheBank, with a Chinese government owned bank, and with Russian
oligarchs hand in glove with Putin.
Kushner took an enormous flyer in high profile Manhattan real estate,
paying 1.8 billion for 666 Fifth Avenue at a time when New York real estate was
booming. He borrowed enormous sums at
very disadvantageous terms, gambling on high rents and occupancy rates in
excess of 90%. Now, the real estate
market is weak, and the building has an occupancy rate of 70%. He is very close to default on the loans, and
has been trying desperately to refinance.
He wanted a secret channel of communication to the Russians because he
needs refinancing, and he needs it fast.

Why would the Russians be interested in helping him? Putin has imperial ambitions. He seeks to recapture at least some of the
former glory of the Soviet Union. But he
is hamstrung by the weakness of the Russian economy. Russia is a Petrostate, propped up by its oil
sales. Three or four years ago, when
crude was selling on the world market for ~$80 a barrel, he had the means to
throw his weight around in Eastern Europe and elsewhere, despite the economic
sanctions imposed by the United States and the EU. But oil is now selling at half that price,
roughly $40 a barrel or even less, and the sanctions are hurting. Alternative energy sources are booming, the
world economy is plodding along with slow growth, and high oil prices are not
likely to reappear any time soon.

Kushner and Trump need Russian money, and Putin needs an
easing of the sanctions. That, I suggest,
is why Putin has been wooing Trump camp figures, and that is why Kushner wanted
a secure communications channel to the Kremlin.

Yesterday afternoon, Susie and I saw a new film about the
life of Emily Dickinson starring Cynthia Nixon.
It is a dark, slow moving, deadly earnest movie in which Nixon’s voice
is heard at many points reading one or another of Dickinson’s poems. Despite a fine performance by Nixon, I left
the theater profoundly disappointed, and yet at the same time aware that
perhaps what I wanted to see in the movie is essentially impossible for a
director or writer to communicate. Let
me explain.

Emily Dickinson led a quiet, outwardly uneventful life in
the New England college town of Amherst – one of its few tourist destinations
is the Dickinson home, which I, like virtually everyone else in town, visited. She never married, she never had a love
affair, so far as we know, and only on rare occasions did she venture beyond
Amherst even to the nearby city of Springfield.
She was also the author of one thousand eight hundred poems, and is
arguably the greatest poet the United States has ever produced. She had a rich, deep, complex mind and as complicated
a relationship to the Christian religion as any poet who has ever lived. And yes, I include in that estimate John
Donne and Gerard Manley Hopkins. The
surface simplicity of her poetry is as deceptive as the surface simplicity of a
Bach Invention.

The movie does a rather good job of portraying Dickinson’s
rebellion against the rigoristic piety of nineteenth century New England
Protestantism, but it does absolutely nothing to explain, or even puzzle over,
the sources and dimensions of her poems.
There is a great temptation, of course, to fill this post with endless
quotations from her poems, a temptation I shall resist. Let me cite just one phrase. In a poem ostensibly about the pink-tinged
clouds one sees as the sun goes down, she writes ”angels wrestled there.” Where we see quiet natural beauty, Dickinson
saw blood sports. If you pause and think
about that fact, you will perhaps begin to gain some insight into her poetic
vision.

The director makes some obvious and inevitable choices: after Dickinson dies and her coffin is being
put in the horse-drawn hearse, we hear Nixon’s voice: “Because I could not stop for death/Death
kindly stopped for me.” The film ends
with Nixon reading “This is my letter to the world/That never wrote to me.” But it also makes some really appalling
choices. When Dickinson is given her
brother’s new baby to hold, she looks down at the infant and says, “I am
nobody, who are you?/Are you nobody too?”
This has got to be the wrongest reading of a great poem ever offered.

How can we communicate, in a film, or indeed in a book, the
creative process of a great poet, a great composer, a great novelist, or a
great painter? The splendid movie, Amadeus, succeeds brilliantly as a movie,
but only because it is really about Salieri, not Mozart. Mozart’s creative genius is treated in the
film as incomprehensible – Salieri says God is dictating the notes to Mozart.

Perhaps I ask too much.
It must be sufficient that a movie, as the word suggests, move us. If we could explain how Dickinson did it,
then we could all do it, and that, alas, is a blessing that New England’s God
has chosen not to bestow.

Saturday, May 27, 2017

I am put in mind about the story of The Little Juggler. What can I possibly add to the celebration of
the flood of news that keeps me, and tens of millions of others, glued to our
TV sets or IPhones? I have never even
met a newspaper reporter, although a good college friend went on, after we had
lost touch, to work for the TIMES. But there is one aspect of this complex story
that fascinates me, and a personal experience from thirty years ago may
illuminate it a bit. I refer to the leaks.

In 1986, I spent five weeks in Johannesburg, South Africa
lecturing on Marx in the Philosophy Department at the University of the
Witwatersrand, or Wits. The chairman of
the department was Jonathan Suzman, the nephew of a famous anti-apartheid
activist Member of Parliament named Helen Suzman. The Suzmans were a wealthy family, and
Jonathan belonged to a toney downtown private men’s club called the Rand Club. After I had been there three or four weeks,
he invited me to dine at the club with him and a small group of prominent men –
some bankers and corporate executives, the editor of one of the leading English
language newspapers [not The Daily
Mail.] I borrowed a tuxedo [only the
third time I had worn one] and went off to see how the one percent lived. There were six or eight of us in a private
dining room, served by quiet, efficient, deferential Black men doing their best
to be invisible.

At this time, the government was carrying out active raids
against groups of fighters based in Botswana who were members of the military
wing of the African National Congress, uMkhonto
we Sizwe. The newspaper editor
gave those of us at the dinner some not-for-publication information about
bombing raids carried out by the South African air force against suspected
camps inside Botswana. A lively
discussion ensued about whether the raids would be successful, where they would
strike next, and the size of the rebel forces.

I sat there, utterly mystified by the ease with which these
men spoke about secret matters in the presence of Black waiters, who, during
the conversation, continued to refill our coffee cups and clear away
dishes. Then I realized the truth: these
smart, well-educated, politically clued up men simply did not see the waiters, they did not exist for
them save as extensions of their dining needs.
It was exactly like Mitt Romney’s famous 47% remark, made at a
supposedly closed dinner and recorded on a cellphone by one of the
waiters. Since I had nothing to
contribute to the conversation, I amused myself by wondering which of the
waiters was the ANC operative charged with reporting everything that was said
at the dinner.

As the flood of leaks continues, I find myself wondering who is doing the leaking. There were very few people in the Oval Office
when Trump blurted out top secret information to the Russian Ambassador and
Foreign Minister [the Oval Office, I am told, is actually not very big, and will
not hold large gatherings.] The leak
must have come from one of those few people present. You do not need to conduct an extensive
investigation to make a short list of suspects.
Are there people working in the White House who are as invisible to Trump
and his “senior advisors” as those waiters were to my dinner partners at the
Rand Club? Some flunky must be tasked
with actually typing up the notes taken by some other flunky at the meeting. My understanding is that when a new
administration come into office, everyone in the old White House right down to
the chef, the bathroom attendants, and cleaning staff is fired and new people
are brought in. These leaks must be
coming from supposed loyalists.

As our distinguished President likes to ask, What the hell
is going on?

Friday, May 26, 2017

I have been increasingly distressed by the direction of American public affairs, and for the first time in my long life, I am fearful for the survival of such democracy as we have in this nation. I do not want to argue about this, I am not interested in being told that I should have been this worried earlier, I simply want to say that for as long as I continue to live, I intend to continue to struggle for what I believe and for the people whom I identify as my comrades. I honestly do not know whether we shall win out in the end, but the alternative, which is to decline into passivity, is unacceptable to me.We are surrounded and confronted by such raw cruelty, brutality, greed, and -- yes, alas -- acquiescence that the struggle will be difficult and the outcome quite uncertain.I will continue to blog about the public world, and also about the ideas that have been my companion and inspiration for a lifetime. I welcome your presence, your comments, your commitment to shared goals and principles.These are hard times.

If I understand the tidbits of news now emerging in the newspapers and on cable news, FBI Director James Comey pursued his investigation of Hillary Clinton's emails on the basis of a bogus "email" produced by Russian intelligence and inserted into a drop of hacked emails. Comey did so knowing that the email was bogus, thereby almost certainly throwing the election to Trump, and then Trump fired him.Can this all be true?

Thursday, May 25, 2017

I trust everyone will agre that Noam Chomsky does not need me either to explain his views or to defend them. My suggestion is that anyone whose curiosity was provoked by my post should first watch the video and then discuss what Chomsky said, not what I said. The comments posted here make it clear that my effort to summarize what Chomsky said was unsuccessful, so I am going to bow out. It is not as though he has been shy about setting forth his views! :)

Wednesday, May 24, 2017

Yesterday afternoon, I wrote a brief message linking to a
video of a lengthy lecture given by Noam Chomsky in Paris four years ago. In this extended post, I am going to lay out
what I understood to be the core of Noam’s remarks. Why on earth am I doing this? The answer is this: What I care most about in the world is deep,
clear ideas, elegantly expounded so that one can see and appreciate their
power, simplicity, and beauty. Chomsky’s
life work in the field of Linguistics has all of these qualities. As I listened to him, I could see, through
his words, the power, the elegant simplicity, of his theories, and so I want to
try to share with you what I heard.

Now, let us be clear.
I know next to nothing about Linguistics. I am a complete novice on the subject. I may very well get something wrong, and I
will surely fail to capture the complexity of Noam’s thought. But it is beautiful, in much the same way that
the central argument of the Critique of
Pure Reason is beautiful, in the way that great mathematics is beautiful.

Chris writes, “In 2003 Charlie Rose asked Chomsky "if
this was your last day on earth, would you like what is mentioned about you to
focus on your political works or linguistic contributions". Chomsky, shrugging and laughing said "to
tell you the truth I honestly don't care".
I can easily believe that Noam said that, and indeed meant it. This post is in no way an attempt to prioritize
his Linguistic theories over his political commentary. It is simply an appreciation, an homage, to the beauty of his ideas.

Chomsky’s theories overturned several widely held
assumptions about the origins of language, about language acquisition, and
about the purpose of language. As I see
it, his analyses rest on three very simple but powerful observations. First, grammatical sentences are potentially
infinite, or at least unbounded, in length.
There is no limit to how long a sentence can be. [At a minimum, one can, by simple
concatenation, extend a sentence indefinitely by adding “and” followed by
another phrase.] It follows from this
that the ability to form infinitely long grammatical sentences could not have
developed little by little, through extension of already existing well-formed
sentences. Thus, it could not be that
first human beings acquired the ability to form simple sentences. Then, through experience or genetic mutation,
they acquired the ability to form somewhat longer sentences. And so forth until finally they had mastered
the ability to form sentences of unlimited length. It follows from this, in contradiction to
very widely held views, that human language ability is not a progressive
enlargement of animal communication capacities.

Think about that for a moment. We are all familiar with the ability of
animals to communicate: bees doing their
tail-wagging “dance” to report on the location of pollen, whales and elephants “talking”
over long distances at low frequencies, hunting packs of dogs or prides of
lions communicating as they quite intelligently pursue prey [as I have seen
them do on safari]. The paleontological
record shows that early hominids had the ability to make simple stone tools as
long as a million years ago, an ability obviously transmitted from generation
to generation by some sort of communication.
What more natural than to see human language as a slow evolution from
these behavioral skills? But Chomsky’s
point, made several times in the lecture, is that this must be wrong, because
no extension or evolution of these animal behaviors could lead to the capacity
for infinitely long strings of symbols.
All the available archaeological evidence suggests that language was actually
created, invented, or developed no more than 100,000 years ago, probably in
pretty much its present form.

Chomsky’s second observation, famously deployed in his
classic critique of the behavioral theory of language acquisition advanced by
B. F. Skinner, is that it is impossible to explain a child’s language
acquisition purely as a response to external stimuli. This is true for three reasons. First, if we take seriously Skinner’s notion
of stimulus and response, there are simply not enough stimuli [in the form of uttered
speech] in the life experience of a little baby to account for the acquisition
of language at the age of one or two.
Second, no amount of stimulus in the form of speech in the vicinity of
the baby can explain the child’s eventual development of the ability to form
new sentences that he or she has not heard before, and perhaps could not have
heard before. Third, the actual sensory
environment of the child is what Chomsky, quoting William James, calls in the
lecture a “buzzing, blooming confusion,” and it is simply impossible on
Skinnerian terms to explain how babies unerringly pick out of that auditory
chaos the instances of language whose presence Skinner supposed serve as the
stimuli in a stimulus/response behavioral event.

Chomsky’s third observation – with which I was not already
familiar and which struck me as extraordinarily powerful – is that if we take from
the theory of evolution the basic insight that the human capacity for language
must be grounded in some genetic mutation, then it is obvious that this
mutation occurred in the genome of a single individual, who was thereby equipped
with the capacity for language acquisition and use. But in order for this mutation to survive, it
must have conferred some competitive advantage to the individual. And
since he or she would be the only human being in the world with the capacity
for language, the fundamental adaptive advantage of the mutation must have derived
from the new ability to think, NOT from an improved ability to
communicate!! BECAUSE WITH WHOM WOULD HE
OR SHE COMMUNICATE?

Chomsky now assumes [taking his guidance from Galileo,
rather elegantly] that the mutation giving rise to the capacity for language
must have been very simple. He suggests
in the lecture that the most elementary, primitive innovation conferred by the
mutation was the ability to take two elements and form from them a simple
unordered set. He names this operation “merge,”
and with considerable formal flair, he proceeds to show how the operation of
merge can, recursively, give rise to sentences of any desired length and syntactic
complexity.

Well, there is vastly more in the lecture, which in turn was
only a cursory overview of a lifework.
But perhaps this is enough to indicate something of its elegance and
beauty.

Tuesday, May 23, 2017

I just spent several hours watching this lecture by Noam Chomsky on Linguistics at the science branch of the University of Paris, which is just next to the Institut de Monde Arabe near my Paris Apartment in the 5th Arrondissement. The session was two hours long, recorded four years ago, and Noam spoke for about an hour and twenty minutes. He was, as you might expect, quiet, reserved, precise, and intelligent. It is always a delight to spend time with a clear, powerful mind. I already was familiar with much that he was saying because I recently read a book he co-authored [which is now packed away, so I cannot pull it off my shelves and tell you the title.] I remember him almost sixty years ago when he came to Harvard as a Junior Fellow and I was a young Instructor. Like all of us, he has aged, but his mind has not changed. I know we all look to him for political commentary these days, but this is the work for which he will be remembered centuries from now. It was a welcome relief from the chaos and disaster of our public world.

Monday, May 22, 2017

African-Americans have an extremely sophisticated relationship
to language, as I explained at length in my videotaped lectures on Ideological
Critique, a sophistication manifested in many ways – in oral traditions, in
literary works, even in music. One of
the best known and most delightful examples of this linguistic skill and
complexity is a verbal game in which one member of a group starts by directing an
imaginative and playful insult at another member, who is his or her target. At this, everyone sits up and takes notice,
aware that a performance has begun. The
target of the insult responds with a variation on the insult that raises its
level. The insults fly back and forth,
each more elaborate, outrageous and extravagant than its predecessor, until one
of the players gets off an insult so utterly over the top that the opponent
cannot immediately come back with a topper.
At that point, everyone collapses in laughter and the winner is
acknowledged. This game is called Playin’
the Dozens, or simply The Dozens.

There is a political version of this game, played by
left-wing intellectuals, that consists in making more and more devastating condemnations
of contemporary society in an effort to gain the upper hand over one’s fellow
radicals as the most unrelentingly negative member of whatever group has
assembled. If one player says that
Donald Trump is a liar, another replies that Trump is a sociopath. The first player responds that Trump is really
different from all Republicans, to which the second responds that there is no
difference between Republicans and Democrats these days. This is topped by the argument that there has
never been a difference between Democrats and Republicans. At this point, another player enters the game
and annihilates both opponents with the statement that there could not be a difference, because all
are merely mouthpieces for capitalism. Everyone
collapses, if not in laughter, than in shared angst.

I was reminded of The Dozens this morning when I read an essay by Chris Hedges posted yesterday on Truthdig
entitled “The Death of the Republic.”
Taking as his text the Roman “year of the five emperors” [AD 193], a sure
sign of a serious Political Dozens player, Hedges rehearses the manifold,
structural, incurable evils of our current politics, and concludes “Our
Republic is dead.” At which point,
presumably, all the rest of us in this contest having been silenced by this pronouncement,
we can applaud, relax, and go about our daily business, reassured that nothing
any of us does can reanimate the rotting corpse. It is an oddly comforting game, comforting
perhaps in the way that post-apocalyptic movies are comforting.

Although I agree with almost every single statement in
Hedges’ indictment of modernity, or of America, or of humanity [the precise
object of his attack is unclear], I am not at all as a consequence inclined to
inaction. Get rid of Trump? Hedges responds, “The relationship between
the state and the citizen who is watched constantly is one of master and slave.
And the shackles will not be removed if Trump disappears.” Retake the House in 2018? “The outward forms of democratic
participation—voting, competing political parties, judicial oversight and
legislation—are meaningless theater.” Perhaps
one of the risks those of us must face who choose action is that most
devastating of accusations, that we are naïve. It is a risk I am willing to take.

I have now returned from my trip to San Francisco, where I
saw my son, Patrick, and his family. I
had the great pleasure on Saturday of watching my grandson, Samuel, get a hit
and an RBI in his baseball game. Samuel’s
team lost, but they are assured a slot in the semifinals for the league
championship and will play again tomorrow.
Since this was San Francisco, all the kids are rabid Giants fans, and I
sat in the little stands with the cheering parents wearing a Giants cap provided
by my son. The teams are all named after
big league teams [Samuel plays for the Rockies], all except the L. A. Dodgers,
the Giants’ mortal enemies. Samuel
explained to me that the kids who had to play for the DODGERS would feel bad. When
I was a boy, seventy years ago, I was a Brooklyn Dodgers fan and the New York
Giants were the enemy, but grandparental loyalty takes precedence over
childhood memories, so I soberly agreed that it would indeed be terrible for a
kid to be saddled with the stigma of playing for the Dodgers.

I have a Southwest visa card on which I have amassed a ton
of points, so my trip out and back was free, but you know Southwest. Coming home I flew from San Francisco to
Milwaukee to Orlando [!!] to Raleigh Durham.
For my foreign readers, just take a look at a map and you will see how
insane that is. On the other hand, all
the flights were on time or early, and no one was dragged off kicking and
screaming. You can’t ask for more than
that.

Thursday, May 18, 2017

One of the curious quirks of American culture is the popular fascination with zombies. I get vampires -- that is all about menstruation. But why zombies? The latest manifestation of this obsession with the undead is the surfacing of Joe Lieberman as the leading candidate for the position of Director of the FBI. Hasn't anyone ever driven a stake through his heart?

Once more, I am decamping, this time to San Francisco for the weekend to see my older son, Patrick, his wife Diana, and my two grandchildren Samuel and Athena. I realize that I am taking the coward's way out by suspending my commentary on the passing scene for a few days, but things are happening so quickly that even taking my morning walk keeps me out of the loop for at least two news cycles.Before I go, let me comment briefly on one recent revelation, this one concerning General [and former National Security Advisor] Mike Flynn. It seems that in the last weeks before Trump's inauguration, Flynn advised against, and thus killed, a plan by the previous administration to support Kurdish troops fighting ISIS in Syria AT A TIME WHEN HE WAS IN THE PAY OF THE TURKISH GOVERNMENT, WHICH OPPOSED SUPPORTING THE KURDS, A FACT THAT WAS KNOWN TO THE TRANSITION TEAM PREPARING FOR THE NEW ADMINISTRATION.This seems to me to be treason, pure and simple. Flynn informed the transition team that he was under investigation for working for the Turkish Government without having registered as a foreign agent, and was listened to and appointed National Security Advisor anyway. What is more, simon-pure boy scout Mike Pence was in charge of the transition team and thus knew all about this, a fact about which he subsequently has lied several times.In a decent well-run country, Flynn would be taken out and shot.

Professor Christia Mercer of the Columbia Philosophy Department has been working on a great plan to link skilled professionals to progressive organizations for whom they could then volunteer. Here is a link to project pro bono. Check it out and get involved. There is a movement afoot in this country, and it needs all of us!

Wednesday, May 17, 2017

When I blog about Marx or Kant or Game Theory or the theory of democracy, I do so with a certain confidence that I have some idea what I am talking about. Readers may disagree with me -- Lord knows they always do! -- but I have at least a prima facie claim to knowledge on those topics. By contrast, when I blog about the current political crisis, I am painfully conscious much of the time of simply echoing what I have read online or heard during my endless surfing of the TV news stations. Nevertheless, I think it is essential to speak about what we are confronting. "Attention must be paid," as Willy Loman's wife insists. Herewith, therefore, my view, offered with full awareness of its lack of authority.The current administration, despite its extraordinary chaotic incompetence, is steadily doing genuinely terrible things that either seek to threaten the lives of countless millions or actually succeed in doing so. Here is just one example among scores. Trump's action will deprive millions of women of essential health services, particularly in Africa, leading to countless preventable deaths and illnesses. That is sheer evil. There is no other word for it.The men and women Trump has appointed to his cabinet will do immeasurable harm to the environment, to women's reproductive health, to education, to worker's rights, and to voting rights. They will greatly increase the number of men and women incarcerated for long periods for non-violent crimes. All of this is the deliberate intention of the entire Republican Party, not merely of the Trump Administration.I do not for a moment believe that Congressional Republicans will act to remove Trump from office, no matter how manifestly egregious his actions, principally because they fear opposition at the polls from Trump supporters. I predict that Trump will survive all scandals, all revelations, and serve out his term unless he actually comes utterly unglued and must be led off in a straight jacket.From all of which I draw the conclusion that the only way to limit the harm being done to millions of Americans is to take back the House of Representatives in 2016 and the White House in 2020. This will by no means end the harm being inflicted by this Administration -- see the example linked to above, which is an example of presidential action alone. But it will limit the damage.How to accomplish this overthrow of the Republican majority in the House? My guess -- not grounded in genuinely deep political knowledge or experience -- is that calls for impeachment will be ineffective, but that a ceaseless hammering on the Republican threats to health care can be a winning strategy. Repeatedly I have heard anecdotal reports from reporters and politicians that outside the Beltway, health care remains a red hot issue while impeachment only agitates the reliable Democratic voters.Meanwhile, I freely admit that I am mesmerized by the chaos and self-inflicted wounds of this White House. But I shall try not to be seduced from attending to the issue that can win back the House.

This just appeared on TPM, one of my favorite progressive blogs:It appears that four months into his presidency, Donald Trump hasn’t developed any keener of an interest in his daily national security briefings.

According to a report published Wednesday by Reuters, Trump is more likely to read national security briefing materials if his name is mentioned in as many paragraphs as possible.

Unnamed officials who have briefed the President and others familiar with his learning processes told the publication that Trump still prefers one-page memos and visual aids.

One unnamed source told Reuters that since Trump “keeps reading if he’s mentioned” in briefing materials, officials on the National Security Council have learned to insert the President’s name into “as many paragraphs as we can.”

In such a world, how on earth is one supposed to write thoughtfully about ideological mystification and capitalist exploitation?

It is beyond the talents and imagination even of Jonathan
Swift to write a satire of the current administration that unmistakably exceeds
the boundaries of the actual. As evidence, I offer this news story,
appearing as I was taking my walk this morning:

“Russian President Vladimir Putin said Wednesday he would be
willing to provide the U.S. Congress a record of President Trump’s meeting with
top Russian envoys, possibly offering new details on the disclosures of
reportedly highly classified intelligence information.

The remarkable offer for the Kremlin to share evidence with
U.S. oversight committees came with the caveat that the request for the
transcript would have to come from the Trump administration.”

I think we can agree that when it comes to humiliating those in an inferior position, Trump has met his match.

Good news from Philadelphia. Today we had a city and state election for court
justices and judges, as well as District Attorney. Lawrence Krasner, far and
away the most progressive candidate in the field, won the DA race. He is a
defense lawyer who represented participants of the Occupy Movement and Black
Lives Matter. Several progressive judges were also elected. Finally, we have a
new progressive City Controller, Rebecca Rhynhart. This is how it starts. I
feel hopeful -- at least for now.

Tuesday, May 16, 2017

I assume that everyone reading this is aware of the basic
facts revealed yesterday concerning Trump’s meeting in the Oval Office with the
Russian Foreign Minister and the Russian Ambassador to the United States. I cannot possibly make useful
up-to-the-minute comments about this because during the time it takes me to type
this, more information will be revealed.
But I think it might be useful to remind ourselves what is actually
at stake here.

It seems that ISIS has been developing a bomb, hidden in a
laptop computer, that is not detectible by the machinery used to scanned
airline passengers. Apparently there are
technical limits on the explosive power of these laptop bombs, such that they
can be expected to bring down an airplane only if the explode fairly close to
the hull, or metal skin, of the plane.
This means that putting them in checked luggage with a timer is probably
not going to work. They must be carried
onto the plane by a suicide bomber who gets a window seat. OK, got that?

The threat of such an attack has been considered
sufficiently serious to lead airlines to ban carry-on laptops on flights
originating in a number of Middle Eastern countries, and a world-wide ban on
laptops on all flights is under consideration, disruptive as that might be.

Some nation [we do not know which one] has an intelligence
plant in a city controlled by ISIS, and that person [it helps to remember that
this is an actual human being, not a drone or a listening device] has garnered
information about the ISIS project, which that nation has shared with the
United States. These sharing
arrangements are super-secret for two reasons:
First, because the nation doing the sharing may not be officially an
ally of the United States, so that it would be compromised by the revelation
that it is sharing intelligence with us [and hence would be less inclined to do
so in the future], and Second, because revealing the mere fact that someone in that
ISIS-controlled city is an agent could easily endanger that person’s life.

Donald Trump blew all of this by shooting his mouth off to
the Russians, who are, with regard to ISIS, not at all our allies. Trump’s action could lead ISIS to delay its
planning for the laptop bomb attacks until it has discovered the mole, or it
could just as well lead them to accelerate the timing of the attacks in order
to carry them out before they are stopped.
That Trump did in fact do what he is reported to have done is demonstrated by the report that immediately
after the meeting, persons in the meeting rushed off to contact the CIA and the
NSA to alert them to what the president had done so that they could try to
contain the damage.

Why did Trump do this?
I have looked at the still photos of the meeting released by the Russian
news photographer and I have read the account of what Trump said [an account
which the Washington Post and the NY TIMES edited so as to delete the
actual information, by the way.] It
seems to me self-evident that Trump was trying to show off, to establish that he
was a big deal in the eyes of the Russians.
He was bragging about the wonderful intelligence he gets every day and
then, to prove it, rather like an insecure ten year old trying to gain street
cred with the big kids in the playground, blurted out some juicy details.

Let me emphasize:
Trump’s braggadocio has put at risk countless air travelers as well as
one or more moles in ISIS, and has made it very much less likely that foreign intelligence
services will share information with the U. S. in the future.

In a tweet this morning, Trump declared defiantly that he
has every right to do what all of his advisors are desperately trying to claim
he did not do. He is correct about that.

All of this caused me to delay my morning walk. This is serious stuff, folks.

Sunday, May 14, 2017

In this post, I am going to try to achieve some clarity of
mind on a matter of very great urgency, particularly for those of us on the
left. This effort is going to be
difficult or me [and perhaps for others who share my political opinions]
because it calls on me to think in ways at least orthogonal to, if not entirely
the reverse of, my usual mode of political analysis. For many, I imagine, what I have to say will
seem so obvious as to require no comment at all, but others may find me
offensively naïve.

All of you, I am sure, are thoroughly familiar with the notion
so often repeated that democratic forms of politics depend not merely on formal
arrangements of governmental institutions and laws but also on a civic culture,
a network of shared and respected norms of discourse and behavior that place
constraints on what powerful actors will allow themselves to do. This is the stuff of endless university
courses on Democracy, of pretentiously middle-brow self-congratulatory books
about the superiority of our political practices in contrast with those of “Third
World Dictatorships,” and of editorials in the upper reaches of the print
media.

For a century and a half now, if not more, left-wing critics
of Capitalism have been condemning these discourses as rationalizations for the
domestic exploitation of workers and the imperial projects of the state carried
out by and in the interest of Capital.
We have developed and deployed powerful conceptual critiques of those
ideological mystifications of state, church, and academy which serve the
purpose of concealing from view the reality underlying the surface appearance
of what Marx famously called the realm of “Freedom, Equality, Property, and
Bentham.”

However, to a degree that I at least have not allowed myself
to acknowledge, we have in our critiques of this false consciousness relied
implicitly to a considerable extent on those very norms of civil society and
democracy whose deceits and mystifications we have labored to expose. No one who has read Marx seriously and deeply,
as I have over many years, can deny that every word of his writings is instinct
with a respect for facts, for reasoned arguments, and for the standards of
honesty and responsibility whose distortion and corruption he excoriates.

Marx himself writes surprisingly little about socialism as a
functioning economic and political system [even less if we exclude what was
written by his colleague Friedrich Engels], but many, including myself, who
have been inspired by his writings have insisted that a socialist society,
based on collective ownership of the means of production, must be
thoroughgoingly democratic in its politics.
I do not know about others, but a Dictatorship of the Proletariat ruled
by Democratic Centralism holds no attraction for me.

Which brings me to the real subject of this post, Donald
Trump. In recent days, we have seen
Trump assault and undertake to destroy virtually all of the norms of behavior
and discourse that Americans have relied on to serve as checks on those whom
they place in positions of power. I
shall not rehearse the litany of these assaults – all of you are familiar with
them. What frightens me – I do not think
that is too strong a word – is the danger that these norms, once allowed to be
defied without punishment, will disappear from our public life. If Trump can fire with impunity one after
another the individuals – U. S. Attorney, Acting Attorney General, Director of
the FBI – charged with investigating his possibly criminal acts, will there
ever again be a time when the political class closes ranks and puts a stop to
such acts? If Trump and his family are
allowed to use the presidency to enrich themselves, will American politics
thereafter be a naked kleptocracy?

Some of you, I am sure, will reply that I am being
hopelessly naïve, that the American ruling class has been robbing the people
for several hundred years, that there is no difference between Trump and George
W. Bush or Barack Obama or Jimmy Carter or Dwight Eisenhower. You will say that
Trump is no worse than any of his predecessors, simply more open in his power
grabs and self-enrichment.

I think you would be wrong to say that. I can recall what American politics was like
when J. Edgar Hoover ran the FBI. Things
have been better since, especially for those of us on the left, and if Trump
chooses another Hoover to run the FBI, I do not think it is out of the
question, to speak personally, that blogs like this will be closed down.

I honestly believe we are at a truly dangerous moment in
modern American history, and the dangers are greatest for those of us on the
left.

I have hesitated to blog about the firing of Comey and the
extraordinary series of events that have followed because anything I might
write is superseded by revelations before my two fat forefingers can hammer out
a comment. But I think I have an
obligation to say something, so
herewith several observations.

First, for my younger readers who do not remember Watergate
or even Iran Contra, the speed with which this is all unfolding is like nothing
we have ever seen before. In the two
days that I was away, there have been three or four twists and turns. If your familiarity with Watergate is All The President’s Men, recall that
from burglary to resignation was thirteen months, during which an entire
presidential election took place. I
honestly do not believe this will continue for another three or four months
before some explosive resolution occurs.

It is patently obvious that Trump is covering up something
that he is terrified to have revealed. What
is it? I do not know. He is unstable, authoritarian, frightened,
blustery, crafty in a small way but not at all clever in a large strategic
fashion. He literally just makes stuff
up. As I watched the Lester Holt
interview, he seemed to be inventing imaginary details on the fly to flesh out
his lies. He claimed that Comey assured
him he was not under investigation. When
Holt rather skillfully pressed him for details, you could see him inventing the
two phone calls as additions to the dinner, which actually took place. “Did you call him, or did he call you?” Holt
asked. Trump, on the spot, made up the
answer, “Once I called him, and once he called me.” I would bet the ranch that is simply
false. Not a lie. That would presuppose that Trump knows the
difference between truth and falsehood.

Why is it important?
Well, one simple reason is that if Trump gets away with it, we are on
the road to dictatorship. I mean that
quite seriously. We are on the edge
right now. If he gets away with it, this
behavior will become the new normal.

A second reason is that Trump and the Republicans want to do
a great many simply horrible things.
Trump's cabinet of deplorables have already begun, and they will
continue to do grave harm to countless millions of people, but many of the
worst things they want to do require legislation, and Trump’s behavior is
weakening their ability to legislate. In
the present climate, there will be no tax bill, no faux infrastructure corporate giveaway, no repeal of legislative
protections to LGBT Americans [although there will be a great deal of weakening
of those protections through simple non-enforcement of existing laws.]

I am apprehensive that Trump will actually behave so
self-destructively that he is removed from office too long in advance of the
2018 mid-term elections. It would be a
great relief if the Democrats can take back the House, and as things are going
now, that looks more and more possible. But if he is gone by the Fall, Pence will settle in and the Republicans will proceed to pass one horrific bill after another.

This is an ugly country, for all its pretensions at moral
world leadership. No matter how well
this turns out, that fundamental fact will continue to be true.

Early Wednesday morning, Susie and I set out to visit my
sister, Barbara, in Washington, DC. The
air travel was free because I had accumulated a great many Southwest points,
which was nice, but there was something a trifle bizarre about flying from North
Carolina to Tampa, Florida so that we could deplane, wait a bit, and then get
back on the same plane to fly to Washington National.

Barbara and I, by a curious accident, are going through
exactly the same experience simultaneously:
selling an apartment, sorting out belongings, hanging out somewhere
during showings, all in order to move to a Continuing Care Retirement Community,
she in Carlsbad, CA and I here in Chapel Hill.

Barbara is enormously smart, with a pellucidly clear mind
and an astonishing breadth of knowledge, especially of molecular and
evolutionary biology. As readers of my
autobiography will recall, as a high school senior, she was the Grand National
winner of the Westinghouse [later Intel] Science Talent Search. She ended her long and varied career as the
Ombud of the World Bank.

I routinely refer to Barbara as my ‘big sister,” which is
how I have thought of her all my life [she is three and a half years older than
I am], but she was never very tall, and age has shrunk her a good deal. [I was 5’9” in my youth, and am now 5’6 ½”.] Her
face has wrinkled, of course, as she approaches 87, and she now walks with a
cane. We met her for dinner at a
restaurant a block from her apartment in Washington Circle, and as I saw her
walking up to meet us, I realized with a shock that she looks very much like
Yoda.

It would not surprise me at all to see her raise a
single-seater spacecraft out of a bog with her mind.

Things are happening so fast in the political world that I am scarcely able to keep up. I would like to say just a word or two about my trip before turning to the meltdown of the presidency, but first I must do chores [shopping for dinner and such.] I am not certain I can blog fast enough to stay ahead of the news.

Wednesday, May 10, 2017

On what may be the most consequential day in American politics since the Saturday Night Massacre, I am about to leave for a long planned trip to DC to see my sister. Talk about planning!I shall be back late tomorrow.

Tuesday, May 9, 2017

Little by little, my life is disappearing into boxes. It is very strange. Meanwhile, let me respond to two questions in
the comments section of this blog.

First, Paul asks: “Curious
to know if, as a 19 year old, you were sympathetic to Quine's approach to the
problem in 'Two Dogmas'.”

Quine’s famous essay, “Two Dogmas of Empiricism,” was
published in 1951, during my first year at Harvard. Two years later, Quine included it in a book
of essays, called, with tongue in cheek, From
a Logical Point of View [part of the refrain of a Calypso song popular at
the time – Quine had a rather wry sense of humor.] I read the essay and then the whole book, but
I confess that I was not taken with his line on the distinction between
analytic and synthetic judgments. I was
much more powerfully impressed with Kant, which I suppose is hardly surprising.

Jerry Fresia asks, a
propos this assertion: “how could
there ever be a de jure authority that didn't necessarily undermine the
autonomy of the people subject to it?”, what about “the authority of teachers
in classrooms, for one, of parents with their kids, for another.....??”

There are two different questions here, and they require
quite different answers, one rather simple, the other quite complex. Simple first.
Teachers do not have authority in classrooms on any plausible vision of
education with which I am familiar [I leave to one side catechism classes.] They have the power to give grades, of
course, and they are, we may hope, authorities on the subjects they teach. But an authority, in that sense, is someone who
knows a great deal about a subject and has sufficiently demonstrated that
knowledge to make it reasonable to come to him or her for information or
guidance in the process of education.
However, at no time do students have a moral obligation to do as such
authorities say, or to believe what they say, in contravention of their
independent judgment as students. We are
all familiar with the phenomenon of disagreements among people considered
authorities on a subject, and it is of course, our responsibility, as
autonomous agents, to weigh their statements and eventually decide where the
truth is more likely to lie. This is
difficult, not to say life threatening, when the experts are, let us say,
oncologists or brain surgeons, but what are we doing when we seek a second
opinion if not exercising our obligation to be autonomous?

The relation of parents to children is much more complex. Here we see most poignantly the logical
conflict [and life conflict] between the classical assumption, found in social
contract theory and elsewhere, that the moral sphere is one of fully mature,
rational agents, and the manifest fact that we are all at one stage or another
of the life cycle of birth, childhood, adulthood, maturity, and old age. The simple reply to Jerry’s question is that
parents never have de jure moral
authority over their children. When the
children are too young and immature to be and act as fully rational moral
agents, the parents are their guardians, charged morally with bringing them to
the point at which they can function as fully developed moral agents. At that point, the children become
autonomous. In effect, if the children
are capable of deferring to the
authority of the parents, then they are moral agents and ought not to do
so. If they are not so capable, then
they cannot, and therefore do not and ought not.

When does the child become an autonomous agent, hence an
adult and no longer bound to obey his or her parents? Ah well, that is the subject of half of the
great literature ever written and all of the anguish that parents experience. About that, I have no special wisdom to
offer. Just the consolation to tormented
parents that whatever they do, it is sure to be wrong,

I think readers of this blog will agree that I do not have a partisan bone in my body. I am a reach-across-the-aisle let's-get-along kind of guy who believes that the American experiment in popular democracy works best when Senators from across this great nation can find common ground. For that reason, I have always had a special place of affection in my heart for Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, who has the extraordinary ability to bring ninety-eight of his colleagues together [excluding only Senator Mike Lee] in agreement that he is a dick. As one of his fellow senators explained, when asked why everyone takes an instant dislike to Cruz, "Because it saves time."I thought of this yesterday while watching the testimony of Sally Yates and James Clapper before a Senate subcommittee. Cruz, a fabled champion debater in college, came loaded for bear, slyly and with manifest self-satisfaction setting a little trap for Yates in his questioning of her refusal, as Acting Attorney General, to defend Trump's original Muslim ban in court.Yates crushed him. You can see the exchange here, where it drew 118,000 views overnight.The commentary after the hearing has been an uplifting manifestation of bi-partisan schadenfreude. The natural centrist in me glowed with pleasure.

Sunday, May 7, 2017

In response to my bemused brief post about the discussion of
anti-natalism that suddenly has broken out on this blog, S. Wallerstein, after
some very kind words, says this: “I suspect that back when you were working as
an academic philosopher, you too discussed whatever issues your academic
philosopher colleagues were talking about with them.”

That got me thinking about the old days, and I realized that
in fact the truth is somewhat different.
To be sure, I did engage in such discussions as a student. Back in the middle ‘50s [the 1950’s not the
1850’s], one very hot topic, endlessly discussed in the journals, was the
analytic/synthetic distinction [you had to have been there.] Two of my professors, Morton White and
Willard Van Orman Quine, published articles on the subject. I can still recall, as a nineteen year old graduate
student, staying up all night brooding about it and rushing over on a Sunday
morning looking for Stanley Cavell. I
found him in the Adams House dining room having a leisurely breakfast with the
poet John Hollander. “Stanley, Stanley,”
I cried, scarcely pausing to say hello, “I think I have solved the analytic
synthetic problem!” He looked down his
nose at me and said languidly, “Please, not before breakfast.” I slunk away, rebuked but not discouraged.

Not long after that I spent a wanderjahr in Europe on a traveling fellowship, neither reading nor
talking about Philosophy [although I did attempt some bad faux Kierkegaardesque ruminations.]
When I got home, I wrote my doctoral dissertation, went in the army, and
started my career. Pretty soon I stopped
reading the journals, and for the next fifty or sixty years pursued the
thoughts in my head rather than those in the journals. I did not go to professional meetings, save
when I was asked to speak at them, and I published books that responded to Kant
or Marx or Mill or the world rather than to what my colleagues were talking
about. I did not even pay very close
attention to what people were writing about me, with the consequence that I was
quite startled recently to learn that my little book, In Defense of Anarchism, had made a considerable impact on legal
scholars and political theorists [the early reviews were all quite negative.]

I do not recommend this course to others; it is simply a
description of what I have done with my life.
So if anti-natalism is all the rage, have at it. It is probably better than trolley cars.

I have to confess that blogging is weird. It has its pleasures, but from time to time the conversation here takes a genuinely strange turn. Anti-natalism? Seriously? With all the challenges that face us, with the disaster that is American politics, with the signs, at long last, of a grassroots progressive surge, we are talking aboiut anti-natalism?Look, far be it from me to stifle discussion. When you are done, I will go on talking about the world.

As I have remarked, I am about to move from the 4th NC CD, which reelected Democrat David Price 70/30, to the 6th CD, which reelected Mark Walker 60/40. It is nice to know my vote will count, but clearly we have our work cut out for us. Tomorrow I shall find our whether Mr. Walker is planning to hold a town hall anywhere near here. I think it is time to speak truth to power.

Saturday, May 6, 2017

As might have been expected, the passage in the House of a bill designed to snatch health care away from more than a score of millions of Americans has provoked an uproar of opposition. But as this story indicates, the resistance does not stop there. Millions of dollars have been donated even before candidates have been selected to use it against Representatives who voted for the bill. The money is in effect in escrow, awaiting contenders to announce! This is a level of intensity of grassroots progressive political activity unlike anything I have ever seen in this country. It will undoubtedly encourage plausible candidates to decide to run. And God bless Jimmy Kimmel, who has turned a personal medical nightmare into an irresistible battle cry.It doesn't take a weatherman to tell which way the wind is blowing, as someone might once have said.

I stumbled on a truly splendid piece of research and reporting that gives precise estimates of the numbers of people in each and every Congressional District who will lose their health coverage if the bill just passed by the House becomes law. To access the Excel spreadsheet with the data, go to this site and then click on the link at the end of the main story [three paragraphs down.] For example, in the 6th NC CD, to which I shall be moving in six weeks, a district represented by Republican Mark Walker, 78,600 people will lose their coverage. Check out your own CD. The 2018 off year election is going to be about this and nothing but this. The Republicans own this now, regardless of what the Senate does, and we must make them eat it.

Friday, May 5, 2017

All of us, I imagine, have at one time or another found ourselves
yelling at the television. I turned on
MSNBC this afternoon just in time to hear a bright, cheerful young thing
explaining to Ali Velshi why it makes no sense to require men to buy life insurance
that insures them for, among other things, maternity expenses. As she said with an enormous smile, “I am
sorry to tell you this, Ali, but you are never going to get pregnant,” she was
so manifestly pleased with her wit that she could scarcely contain herself. Let us set to one side the notion, apparently
anathema to a good many conservatives, that we should care about the well-being
of others [even if they are no longer fetuses].
I feel the need to explain just exactly why it is in the self-interest
of unmarried men to pay something to ensure the healthy delivery of
babies. If you know all of this a
thousand times over, my apologies, but writing a blog post is a tad more
satisfying than throwing fruit at a TV screen.

The life cycle is the central fact of human existence. Assuming that we are fortunate, we are born,
we grow to maturity, we live, we grow old, and we die. These days in the United States that process
takes, on average, a bit less than eight decades.

Now, to live, we need food, clothing, shelter, medical care,
and – I am hesitant to acknowledge – cell phones. It is also nice for us to have movies to
watch, music to listen to, restaurants to go to, and airplanes to ride in. Not absolutely essential, to be sure, but
nice. A great many people imagine that
they can ensure their supply of food, clothing, shelter, and the latest upgrade
in cell phones by prudently engaging in systematic saving, setting aside a bit
of their income each year in a pension plan of some sort so that when their
earning days are over, they can live on what they have saved. But that is, I should like to point out, a
very superficial and shortsighted view.

This is 2017. Let us
suppose that I am a thirty year old unmarried man gainfully employed here in
Chapel Hill, NC. My life plan has me
retiring at 70 [I have one of those white collar jobs that does not wear the
body down.] That means that in 2057 I will
stop earning and start spending my pension.

Today, when I go to the grocery store for dinner, I will buy
fresh fruits and vegetables [I am, let us suppose, a health nut.] These fruits and vegetables are grown by
farmers in California, harvested by low paid undocumented workers, trucked East
by unionized truckers, and sold to me by the staff of the local Whole Foods
outlet. If I get sick, I will go to the
Ambulatory Care Center [or ACC] at UNC Health Services and be looked after by a
doctor and several attending nurses and medical students [it is a division of a
teaching hospital.]

In 2057, who will grow, harvest, and truck East my fruits
and vegetables? Who will treat me when I
am sick, as I imagine I will be from time to time at age seventy? I will have the money to pay for them because
I have for forty years prudently saved a little each year. But although I am putting away money, I am
not, as though I were a squirrel, storing bread and yoghurt and shoes!

The people who provide all of those things for me now will not
still be providing them for me in forty years.
In forty years, those people will
all pretty much be retired except for the medical students, who will be senior
physicians. No, I will be fed and
clothed and housed and amused and treated by a raft of people who are now
babies or children, if indeed they have even been born yet.

Think about that for a moment. No matter how self-reliant I am, no matter
how healthy a life I live, my survival in old age will depend completely on the
labor of people who are being born now.
Is it in my self-interest that those people be born healthy, grow to
maturity healthily, get educated, and live productive lives? You are damned right it is.

Imagine I am rushed to the Emergency Room in 2057 with a
heart attack, only to be told that the physician who was to attend me isn’t
there because forty years ago her mother had inadequate pre-natal care and so
she did not make it through the first year of life. Of course, if maternity care had been part of
a health insurance plan that unmarried
men like me contributed to, thus making it affordable, that little girl would
now be a physician capable of saving my life.

THAT, YOU TWIT, IS
WHY EVEN ALI VELSHI SHOULD CONTRIBUTE TO A MEDICAL INSURANCE PROGRAM THAT
INSURES MATERNITY CARE.

The little back and forth about the title of Willem deVries’
book Hegel’s Theory of Mental Activity
got me thinking about the titles of my books, and I realized that no fewer than
seven of my books have titles that
are borrowed from other books, including one whose title is borrow from a book
by me!

The first was the little book Barrington Moore, Jr., Herbert
Marcuse, and I did in 1965, A Critique of
Pure Tolerance [a joke title proposed by Herbert.] This was followed by The Poverty of Liberalism in 1968.
This is actually a grandson title.
The original was Proudhon’s La
Philosophie de la Misère, to which Marx responded with La Misère de la Philosophie [i.e. The Poverty of Philosophy] on
which I then piggybacked. The next year,
I published The Ideal of the University,
a steal from John Cardinal Newman/s classic work The Idea of the University [or homage
as we say in the writing game]. The year
after that I brought out In Defense of
Anarchism, the title taken from a wonderful Mark Twain essay, “In Defense
of Harriet Shelley.” Then, in 1973, I
edited a forgettable collection of essays by various authors called 1984 Revisited. In ’85, having no better idea, I called my
book on Marx’s economic theories Understanding
Marx, an echo of my ’77 book Understanding
Rawls. Finally, in 2005, I published
Autobiography of an Ex-White Man, a
deliberate steal from and reference to the famous James Weldon Johnson novel Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man.

As I was writing all this, I was blithely unaware of my
habit of stealing titles. I am sure it
has some deep meaning, but I cannot for the life of me imagine what that is.

I have been shunning cable news since the House vote
yesterday on the Republican health bill.
I simply could not stomach endless replays of the gloating and
celebrating by Trump and the Republicans.
There is not the slightest chance of anything remotely like it passing
the Senate, and there is good reason to hope that the vote will cost the
Republicans some House seats in 2018, but the mere passage of the bill will apparently
so roil the insurance markets that large numbers of people will lose coverage
or experience unaffordable increase in their insurance costs. In short, people will die as a consequence of
the vote.

I fear some on the left have allowed themselves to be buoyed
by the inability of the Republicans to pass major pieces of legislation. Even in that absence, Trump has managed to do
an extraordinary amount of harm. People
have been bemused and misled by the scattering of unexpectedly liberal things
that come from his mouth or from his Twitter fingers. In fact, every single domestic appointment of
this administration, without exception, has been appallingly, unimaginably bad. Department after department has been put in
the control of someone who is publicly, on record, opposed to its core
purpose. The only saving grace is the
fact that Trump has filled virtually no positions below the top, thus depriving
the departments of the ability to carry out the ugly policies of the man or
woman in charge.

We must continue to organize from below, putting forward
progressive candidates and supporting everyone who is an improvement over the
existing office holder. The truth is
that America is, for many different reasons, a morally and politically ugly
country, and I honestly do not know how much we can do to change that, but this
is where I live, so I have to try.

Now, that is as much air time as I am willing to give to the
little Eeyore struggling to push his way past my inner Tigger.

Thursday, May 4, 2017

Forty-seven boxes did it, so I turned my attention to stuff crammed into my office closet. In a box otherwise filled with a lifetime of offprints, I surfaced a book entitled Knoiwledge and Politics, edited in 1989 by Marcelo Dascal and Ora Gruengard of Tel Aviv University. In it I found an essay I had rotally forgotten writing, called "Absolute Fruit and Abstract Labor: Remarks on Marx's Use of the Concept of Inversion." It was inspired by the early hilarious book by Marx and Engels called The Holy Family. A quick glane suggests that it is a version of part of Moneybags Must Be So Lucky.

I spent all yesterday packing books. At this moment, I am up to 43 boxes, and I think another 20 or 25 should do it. When I finished packing the last of the books by and on Marx [4 boxes] I had a tiny bit of space left in the last one, so I used it to pack my copy of the King James Bible. It seemed appropriate somehow, but I shall be sorry to be without the Good Book for two months.

Wednesday, May 3, 2017

I have begun the long tedious task of packing to move. The day before the movers come, the extended family will turn out to help the old folks, but with all this time [we move on June 28th] I decided to start on my books. I bought a stack of very nice easy to assemble boxes from Staples and set to work. I am labeling the boxes, which will be broken down into five sets [maybe 60-70 boxes in all.] There is the main alphabetical run, all the Marx books [including the complete English translation of the works of Marx and Engels -- the German is in Paris], all the economics books, all the Afro-American Studies book, and everything by me, including books, journals or collections in which I appear [offprints are already in a box in my closet], my doctoral dissertation, extra copies of translations, etc.This morning, I had gotten as far as I-12, the twelfth box of the first group, which brought me to the letter H, and as I climbed on a little step stool to reach the top shelf, I came on the rather small Hegel collection. There I saw a book I had clearly never opened, by Willem A. deVries, entitled Hegel's Theory of Mental Activity, published by Cornell in 1988. I checked and there is no reference to me in the Bibliography or Index.Now, I mean, how likely is it that deVreis hit on this title completely independently of my 1963 book, Kant's Theory of Mental Activity?Weird.

Tuesday, May 2, 2017

Like many of you, I should think, I spend a certain amount of
time listening to National Public Radio, in my case when I am in my car running
errands. Today, I took Susie to the
dentist and sat outside in my car waiting for her. I tuned in a show called “1A,” short for “First
Amendment.” It is the successor to the
Diane Rehm Show which ran here in North Carolina for many years from 10 am to
noon five days a week. The show is
hosted by someone named Joshua Johnson who sounds to me like a young man
[although everyone sounds young to me.]
The topic was what to make of Trump’s recent rash of adoring statements
and friendly overtures to a pretty fair sampling of the world’s dictators –
Putin, Erdogan, Duterte, Kim Jong-un. In
the course of the conversation, I heard something I had never heard before on
NPR. What struck me most forcefully was
the spontaneous eruption it triggered from Johnson.

I should explain to my overseas readers that talk shows on
NPR are almost always polite, informed, restrained, apolitical or if not that then
politically balanced, the ideal fare for urban upper middle class college
educated types who can be counted on to vote, to support good causes, to
recycle, and to express sympathy for the poor, for the homeless, for the
oppressed and of course for Native Americans.
Listening to NPR makes me feel clean, the way I have always imagined
Catholics feel after finally going to confession. The one thing missing from the typical NPR
talk show is truth, naked, raw, unqualified, unapologized for truth.

In the discussion today, the guests were being asked to
speculate on the reasons for certain of Trump’s recent statements and actions: the congratulatory call to Erdogan, the
invitation to Duterte, the rather unanticipated statement that he would be “honored”
to meet with Kim Jong-un. Why would Trump
speak in this way about rulers who murdered their own countrymen, even their
own relatives, rigged elections, oppressed opponents, threw reporters in jail?

One after another, guests speculated that Trump was trying
to upend long-standing American foreign policy, or was speaking thoughtlessly,
or had some hidden negotiating strategy in mind. To each of these guests, Johnson responded
courteously, respectfully, clearly signaling that these were just the sorts of
sober, serious, thoughtful comments he wished to encourage.

Then it happened. One
of the guests, I do not know whom it was, said quietly, “I think it is envy.” Johnson erupted almost before the words had
been uttered. In a loud, flustered
voice, he burst out, “But you cannot mean that you think he would like to do
those things! But, but, but, surely you
do not mean that.” Johnson went on in this
way, speaking over his guest, who was trying, so far as I could hear, to say “Yes,
I think that is just what he wants to do.”

It was so manifestly, obviously, undeniably true, and at the same time so nakedly partisan,
that it made Johnson’s head explode.

It was, in its simplicity, the truest thing I had ever heard
on NPR. I do not imagine that guest will
be invited back.

About Me

As I observed in one of my books, in politics I am an anarchist, in religion I am an atheist, and in economics I am a Marxist. I am also, rather more importantly, a husband, a father, a grandfather, and a violist.